Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1978

Postgraduate Education - Purposes and Problems Keynote Address o f ASA IHL Seminar on Postgraduate Education in Southeast Asia b y Professor MA Lin It is indeed my pleasure and privilege to have this opportunity to address the participants in the ASAIHL Seminar on Postgraduate Education in Southeast Asia and to share some of my thoughts with them. The principal aim of this talk will be that of providing an overview of the broad scope within which discussions on aspects of postgraduate education will take place. The programme of the Seminar indicates that sessions will be devoted to discussions on three topics: research, social needs and institutional inter change. Although these three aspects of postgraduate education have been selected for detailed discussion, the list is by no means complete. There are other aspects some of which may be of equal or possibly even greater significance to educationd institutions in our region. I trust a positive choice among alternative topics has been made so that there will be enough time for a meaningful exchange of opinion on them. As I cannot honestly claim to be an expert on education, let alone postgraduate education, my approach to the subject will be that of a concerned and somewhat informed layman. I shall speak about certain issues which I feel may be discussed in greater detail in the forthcoming sessions. The views expressed on these issues are entirely my own and they should not be taken as the official views of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. My colleagues who form the University's delegation will be able to make more concrete contributions to the discussions. Research and Graduate Education Let us examine the first topic: research and graduate education. Should research training be a required part of graduate education? To answer this question, perhaps we should first look at the relation between teaching and research. Teaching and research are two complementary activities to which most of the energies of a modern university are directed. Although the relative im­ portance between the giving of instruction and the advancement of knowledge has varied from age to age, yet in every century there were men in the universities who, in one way or another, added to the sum of human knowledge and expanded the range of academic and scientific interests. Indeed, one of the main characteristics of university development in the present century has been a general awareness of the importance of research, which is often organized on a large scale, especially in the fields of science and technology. Within a university context, there is no conflict between teaching and research. Teaching is necessarily fertilized by research which the authors of the Rob- bins Report defined as a "convenient portmanteau word to cover the wide range of intellectual activities that serve to increase man's power to understand, evaluate and modify his world and his experience". Teaching that is confined merely to the handing down of what is known or deemed to be known, in the long run becomes pedantic, lifeless and unin teresting. But when a teacher is himself engaged in work at the frontiers of knowledge and thought, his teaching is vivified. It is a common experience that when enquiring closely into a chosen subject, a researcher not only finds himself picking up a sur prising amount of miscellaneous information about his subject in general but gets it into a new and revealing perspective. The stimulating effect on teaching of this wider vision and more comprehensive grasp is something to which anyone who has been subjected to it can testify. Moreover, an alert and critical approach on the part of the teacher to the content and validity of what he is teaching, no matter how well worn the theme or commonplace the topic, will often enough suggest the need for reconsidera tion or further inquiry and so lead on to research. This brings us to the most important point about the purposes of education at university level. University education must provide the student with a body of general knowledge with skills and techniques 4